We discuss theoretical approaches to blocking effects, with particular emphasis on cases in which words appear to block phrases (and perhaps vice versa). These approaches share at least one intuition: that syntactic and semantic features create possible “cells” or slots in which particular items can appear, and that blocking occurs when one such cell is occupied by one form as opposed to another. Accounts of blocking differ along two primary dimensions: the size of the objects that compete with one another (morphemes, words, phrases, sentences); and whether or not ungrammatical forms are taken into consideration in determining the correct output (relatedly, whether otherwise well-formed objects are marked ungrammatical by competition). We argue that blocking in the sense of competition for the expression of syntactic or semantic features is limited to insertion of the phonological exponents of such features (the Vocabulary items of Distributed Morphology) at terminal nodes from the syntax. There is thus no blocking at the word level or above, and no competition between grammatical and ungrammatical structures. The architectural significance of these points is emphasized throughout the discussion.
The topic of this paper is the manner in which syntactic voice alternations (and syntactic configurations more generally) relate to voice morphology, and the implications of this for theories of voice and theories of morphology/syntax interactions. I argue based on the voice system of Modern Greek for three primary points: first, that treatments taking voice morphology as corresponding to a syntactic argument of the verb (see references below) will not work for voice systems like Greek; second, that voice morphology in Greek must be analyzed as related to a morphological feature which is added post-syntactically in specific syntactic configurations; and, third, that this analysis has consequences for the study of syntax/morphology interactions more generally. These points and their implications are discussed within the context of the theory of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz (1993) and related work.) In order to establish these points certain sets of theoretical background assumptions must be highlighted; in the following paragraphs I review the major points of this discussion and provide an overview of previous theoretical treatments.
An important discussion in theories of argument structure concerns the explanatory division of labor between thematic properties and event structure. English get-passives, analyzed in much previous work as differing thematically from be-passives, provide an interesting test case. We present an analysis of get-passives centered on the proposal that they contain additional event structure (realized as get) relative to their be counterparts. We employ by-adjuncts to identify the different event structures in passive types, and use other diagnostics to support our analysis. Further discussion considers the prominent proposal from previous studies that get-passives differ thematically from be-passives in (sometimes) assigning an Agent role to their surface subjects. We show that contrasts between get and be on this dimension are a consequence of event-structural differences between the two. The result is a unified analysis of the get-passive that has implications for the role of event structure in understanding the syntax and interpretation of arguments.
The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the processing of auditorily presented English compounds that were semantically transparent (e.g., farmyard) or partially opaque with an opaque head (e.g., airline) or opaque modifier (e.g., pothole). Three auditory primed lexical decision experiments were run to examine to what extent constituent priming effects are affected by the semantic transparency of a compound and whether semantic transparency affects the processing of heads and modifiers equally. The results showed priming effects for both modifiers and heads regardless of their semantic transparency, indicating that individual constituents are accessed in transparent as well as opaque compounds. In addition, the results showed smaller priming effects for semantically opaque heads compared with matched transparent compounds with the same head. These findings suggest that semantically opaque heads induce an increased processing cost, which may result from the need to suppress the meaning of the head in favor of the meaning of the opaque compound. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
